Friday, 5 July 2013

The coffins seen above were photographed in 1919 high up a cliff-face at a very remote part of New Zealand. Each coffin was hewn-out by stone tools from a single log, like a dugout canoe

These coffins were not planked or made from sawn timbers, as one would expect colonial-European coffins to be fabricated at any point during the colonial era. The lids were also hewn from a single, thick plank, with the edge lip (used for locking the lid firmly onto the coffin box) laboriously carved by scalloping out the central region. The cultural habit of carving coffins in this manner, as single hewn pieces, is reminiscent of the mummy-boards of Egypt, which fully encased the body of the deceased. One skeleton lies on what appears to have been the base of an old canoe.

These skeletons display recognisable European physiology. They were already very old when found in isolated country, far from the consecrated ground of a churchyard. The deceased people were, undoubtedly, the white Ngati Hotu, known in local Maori and European folklore to have hidden from the cannibals for centuries in this inhospitable region. The location was less than 50-miles further into the rugged badlands interior from where the last of the Ngati Hotu tribe were defeated and cannibalised in the “Battle of the Five Forts” at Pukekaikiore (hill of the meal of rats).